Grave Wounds: blood, bivouac and weather

A d100 roleplaying game where wounds behave like real wounds. Where you are hit matters more than how hard. Fights end in incapacitation far more often than death, and the dying happens on a clock that first aid can stop. Off the battlefield, the team lives with what the fight left behind: wounds to dress, sickness in camp, food to find, and weather that makes a day's march easy or brutal.

Players lead a small team rather than a lone hero. The game spans historical eras, from the Crusades to the modern day, and speculative ones in the spirit of Aftermath!, The Morrow Project, Gamma World and Traveller.

Status: early design. The rule book is built and is being split into books: the Rules (dist/rules.html, from the 14 chapters in templates/rules/ and the modules in templates/rules/modules/) and a book for each period, the so far The Medieval Wars (dist/book-medieval.html), The Black-Powder Wars (dist/book-black-powder.html) The World Wars (dist/book-world-wars.html) Korea and Vietnam (dist/book-korea-vietnam.html) and The Late Wars (dist/book-late-wars.html). The design proposal is in docs/design.md. It includes a comparison with Aftermath!, Rolemaster, Gamma World, Traveller and The Morrow Project. The first playtest era is medieval.

First playable piece: the roller now runs the Grave Wounds stop check, graze and team morale. Each fighter has a side, a leader flag and a Nerve rating. A hex battle map holds the fighters' positions, with movement, leaving contact, and weapon reach and range. The one-page rules are in docs/combat.md.

Lethality: every page has a Gritty | Standard | Heroic switch, the GM's setting for how much the player characters are spared: fate points a season, more Blood, and an easier stop check. Followers and enemies are never spared. See the rule book's Lethality.

Travel map: dist/travel.html marches forces from camp to the field across 0.6-mile (1 km) hexes of terrain, with planned routes, marching days and terrain painting. It comes with a test valley, the Agincourt campaign of 1415 (Harfleur to Calais) and the Serbian retreat of 1915 (Kraljevo to the Adriatic), both on 3-mile (5 km) hexes, the Towton campaign of 1461 (Pontefract to York), Valdemar IV's invasion of Gotland in 1361 (the landing to Visby), the Lützen campaign of 1632 (Naumburg to Leipzig), the raid on Sidon in 1253 (Banias to the coast), the siege of Jacob's Ford in 1179 (Tiberias to Banias), the Crécy campaign of 1346 (the Somme to Crécy), the Aljubarrota campaign of 1385 (Leiria to Alcobaça), the Dornach campaign of 1499 (Basel to Liestal), the Albuera campaign of 1811 (Badajoz to Santa Marta), the Cowpens campaign of 1781 (the Pacolet to the Broad), the Niagara campaign of 1814 (Fort Erie to Fort George), the siege of Sevastopol in 1855 (Kamiesh to the Chernaya), the First Bull Run campaign of 1861 (Fairfax to Gainesville), Fort Phil Kearny on the Bozeman Trail in 1866-67, Mons in 1914 (Condé to Binche), the Somme in 1916 (Doullens to Bapaume), El Alamein's northern sector in 1942 (the coast to Miteiriya), the Bougainville perimeter in 1944, the Anzio beachhead in 1944 (to Cisterna), Osan in 1950 (Suwon to P'yongt'aek), Chipyong-ni in 1951 (Yangpyong to Wonju) and the Chosin Reservoir in 1950 (Yudam-ni to Hungnam), all on 0.6-mile (1 km) hexes; Cassino in 1944, Kapyong in 1951 (the Kapyong valley), Heartbreak Ridge in 1951, Pork Chop Hill in 1953, the Ia Drang in 1965 (X-Ray and Albany), Hue in 1968 (the city and Phu Bai), Khe Sanh in 1968 (the base and its hills), Dak To in 1967 (the base to Hill 875), Hamburger Hill in 1969 (the A Shau valley), Goose Green in 1982 (the Darwin isthmus), 73 Easting in 1991 (the 2nd Armored Cavalry's last day), Grozny in 1995 (the New Year's assault), Fallujah in 2004 (Operation Phantom Fury), COP Keating in 2009 (the Kamdesh valley) and Wanat in 2008 (the Waygal valley) on 0.3-mile (0.5 km) hexes; and Mogadishu in 1993 on 270-yard (0.25 km) hexes. See docs/travel.md.

Camps and works: forces make camp on the travel map, from a bivouac to a fortified camp. A camp can be sent to the battle map as a fight, with its ditch, bank, palisade, gate or stakes laid out. Works can also be built by hand on the battle map, and they change movement, cover and close combat and can be breached. See docs/works.md.

Calendar and weather: each map has a start date, latitude and climate. Days have real dates and daylight, and the weather is rolled from climate normals (the GM can change it). Mud, snow and floods slow the march; rain, wind and fog affect bows and firearms in battle; and the night's rest and fatigue follow from the camp and the weather. See docs/weather.md.

Camp disease: forces on the travel map fall sick with bloody flux, camp fever, typhoid, ague and plague. The risk depends on camp hygiene, the ground, the weather and how long they stay. The sick slow the march, leave fewer men to dig and fight, and some die. See docs/travel.md.

Unit combat: for battles of hundreds, the rank and file fight as units, resolved in bulk each minute through the same wound tables. Morale decides most fights, and the rout does most of the killing. Named characters still fight one by one. The field map, dist/field.html, puts units on 11-yard (10 m) hexes: each side moves, then every melee and volley is resolved together, with flank and rear, morale and the pursuit, batteries of guns firing round shot, canister and shell (bounding on over firm ground, at named targets, ordered shot, split sections, cut fuses and canister into a charge, until the rounds run out), machine guns, artillery and mortars on call with suppression, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and carriers (with their riders) against rockets and guided missiles, on painted ground with the battle map's works and weather, or on a real battlefield (Sidon, the castle at Jacob's Ford, Visby, Crécy, Aljubarrota, Agincourt, Towton, Dornach, Lützen, Albuera, Cowpens, Lundy's Lane, the Great Redan at Sevastopol (June and September 1855), First Bull Run, the Fetterman Fight, the Wagon Box Fight, Mons 1914, the Babuna pass and Topolčani in 1915, the Montenegrin stand at Mojkovac in 1916, the Newfoundland Park at Beaumont-Hamel in 1916, Snipe at El Alamein in 1942, Hill 700 on Bougainville, the Rangers at Cisterna, Task Force Smith at Osan, the perimeter at Chipyong-ni, landing zone X-Ray, the crash sites in Mogadishu, the patrol base at Wanat, Cassino's ridges and ruins, Fox Hill at Toktong Pass, Hill 504 at Kapyong, Hill 931 on Heartbreak Ridge, Pork Chop Hill, the new city at Hue, Hill 861A at Khe Sanh, Hill 875 at Dak To, Hamburger Hill, Darwin Hill at Goose Green, the rise at 73 Easting, the railway station in Grozny, the Jolan in Fallujah, or Combat Outpost Keating, with both armies drawn up). A fight on the travel map can be fought there, and its wounded go back to camp, where wound fever can take them. An optional scripted commander can play either side, attacking or holding (an objective hex the GM marks if wanted, and a second to go on to or fall back to), with an Undo for each of its moves: it moves, digs in and lays or lifts mines with its men, carries them up in its vehicles, limbers, tows and unlimbers its guns, and calls its batteries and aircraft (smoke, illumination at night, counter-battery fire, and moving batteries that are under it). See docs/units.md.

Campaign: dist/campaign.html is the GM's console over the pages: muster, march, fight, aftermath and downtime, what to do in each, where the team, the map and the fight stand, the campaign's log, and the whole game saved to a file and loaded back. It gives the travel map's forces their routes and camps, runs its clock (Run the march) until forces meet, sets up the fight, takes a battle's result back, and follows the pages by itself when a fight is sent from the travel map or won. See docs/campaign.md.

How to play: dist/guide.html walks through the pages mode by mode: a fight at the table, the GM's script, a fight online, a battle, a campaign, a campaign with players online, and joining as a player. python3 tools/guide/check.py (in CI) checks every control it names is still on the pages.

Rule book: dist/rules.html teaches the game: making a team, the fight, wounds, first aid and recovery, battles of hundreds, the march and the camp, and weather and works, following one team from the road to Towton into camp; then the other eras, night, and money by era; then the four modules a period book can switch on: black-powder guns, modern fire, armour and mines, and air and night devices. GM notes are set apart, and an index of its terms closes it. It prints cleanly from the browser, with page numbers in Chrome and Edge. Each era's own figures (its prices, pay, coin, tongues, prisoners, women under arms, supplies and kit) are in its period book.

Period books: dist/book-medieval.html, The Medieval Wars, c.1180-1500: the medieval armies' figures, a note on where each wound table comes from, and the eight battlefields from Jacob's Ford (1179) to Dornach (1499), each with what happened, how the field is drawn, the armies as drawn up and the phases. dist/book-black-powder.html, The Black-Powder Wars, 1618-1877: the figures of five eras (the Thirty Years' War, horse and musket, the Crimea, the Civil War and frontier, and the Plains nations) and nine battlefields from Lützen (1632) to the Wagon Box (1867). data/books.yaml says which eras and battlefields each book holds. dist/book-world-wars.html, The World Wars, 1914-1945: both world wars' figures and nine battlefields from Mons (1914) to the Poles at Cassino (1944). dist/book-korea-vietnam.html, Korea and Vietnam, 1950-1973: both wars' figures, eleven battlefields from Osan (1950) to Hamburger Hill (1969), and a rifle squad in Vietnam followed through one night. dist/book-late-wars.html, The Late Wars, 1982-2014: the later wars' figures and seven battlefields from Goose Green (1982) to Combat Outpost Keating (2009).

Team builder: dist/team.html makes a team of four to six in a few rolls each, from the tables of eleven eras (medieval, the Thirty Years' War, horse and musket, the Crimean War, the Civil War and frontier, the Plains nations of the 1860s and 1870s, the First and Second World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Falklands to Afghanistan): characteristics (3d6 x 5 or a fixed array), an origin with a trait and a drawback, one to three career terms with their events, old wounds rolled on the region's wound table, and kit, with what that kit is worth and a purse of savings. Prices come from data/equipment/<era>.yaml, each army's coin with a common soldier's day's pay (a Day), so a sheet reads "kit worth about 21 Days; purse 60 Days (£1 10s)". Between fights the team can find work: each era has its own jobs (data/jobs/<era>.yaml), picked by where the team is, each with a skill check for the pay and a chance of trouble. What a man earns goes into his purse, and he can buy from the era's price list out of it. Away from an army that feeds him he pays his keep, at a job or on the travel map, and one purse follows him from the team builder to the roller and the travel map. Men rise in rank by vacancy, time served and a roll of Command, draw their rank's pay while their army feeds them, and take loot, prize money or ransoms by the era's rules, with the provost to fear where plunder was forbidden (the roller suggests deeds from the enemies a man put down, counts coups, and offers the loot when a fight is won); the Plains nations count coups and horses instead. Skills used well (a job, a hit or a parry, first aid, foraging, nursing, keeping watch), or taught by a master, a better teammate or the army's drill in camp, roll to rise at the end of each season, and time served adds a career term. Men age: Endurance, then Agility, then Strength decline from 30, steadiness and judgement grow to 40, hard seasons wear them, and a long campaigner is in the end worn out and sent home. What a man carries counts: his era's fighting order, marching order or full kit against his weight and Strength slows the march, blisters the feet and costs him Dodge in a fight, and packs dropped before a fight are lost with the field. And fighting wears on the mind: Strain from combat days, wounds and comrades lost builds toward a breakdown (nostalgia, shell shock, combat exhaustion, by era), calibrated to the US Army's 1944 figures, with forward treatment, rest and rotation home. A man taken prisoner faces his era's captivity: killed or robbed on capture, exchanged, paroled or ransomed, escaping, or dying at the rates the records give, from Cabrera and Andersonville to Japan and Korea. Men swim or drown by their load, armour and the cold, climb walls and cliffs, fall, wade fords on the march, and run or ride each other down. Each speaks his own tongue and perhaps others, by army: orders, surrenders and questions across tongues can be misheard, and a good speaker can pass as one of the enemy. Men stand well or badly with a lord, a colonel or a band chief who can grant favours, and who may die, fall or change sides. A man lost is replaced the era's way: rolled anew, assigned by the army after a wait, or hired. On the travel map forces lose men on the road as the records say they did: desertion, straggling, injuries and horses by era and by whether they are in camp, marching or withdrawing, with an era table of incidents; a hungry or unpaid force deserts faster, and a mounted force that loses its horses marches as foot. Women serve where the records show they did (French cantinières in the Crimea, Civil War women disguised as men, Soviet women in 1941-45, the Vietnamese, and the Americans, British and Russians since 1991), chosen or rolled at the army's share. Sent to the roller, each character's skills fill in his attack and defence; a big team's followers get a line each. makes one on the command line. See .

Units: every page has a US | Metric switch in its header (US by default), shared by the roller, the travel map and the field map and remembered in the browser. The rules and data stay metric inside; the printed tables and these docs give US units with metric in brackets.

Backlog: known gaps and deferred work are listed in docs/backlog.md.

Where this started

This repository began as a copy of HitLoc, the historical hit-location and wound roller, taken at HitLoc PR #14 and renamed to the gravewounds package. The two projects are separate and will diverge. HitLoc stays a system-neutral wound tool, and this repo becomes the game.

Everything inherited from HitLoc is still here and still builds:

• d100 hit-location tables weighted by real wound records, with sources (data/)
• wound effects, armour, weapons and example combatants
• the web roller with its wounded-fighter tracker and turn order
• combatant figures, conflict maps and period pictures
• printable tables and the JSON data bundle

docs/hitloc-reference.md documents all of this. It is HitLoc's README, with commands updated for this repo. Parts the game does not need will be pruned in later changes.

Building

pip install -r requirements.txt
python build.py                  # rebuild dist/ and index.html
python -m gravewounds check      # validate the data
python -m gravewounds list
python -m gravewounds roll --table towton-1461-all-hits --weapon bill -n 3
python -m gravewounds selfplay --field wanat-2008   # the enemy commander on both sides

build.py writes:

• dist/guide.html, how to play: templates/guide.html, copied as it is.
• dist/rules.html, the rule book: chapters in templates/rules/*.md, every number filled in from the data (gravewounds/rulebook.py, and rulebook_later.py for chapters 9-13; chapter 14, money, from rulebook.py); the index is gathered from the terms set in bold (rulebook.index_terms). The pages are put together by gravewounds/books.py: a chapter's {{era:name}} table shows each book's own eras' rows, and the Rules point to them
• dist/book-medieval.html (and later period books), from data/books.yaml, the data and each battlefield file's opening notes (gravewounds/books.py)
• dist/roller.html, dist/travel.html and dist/field.html
• dist/tables.pdf and dist/tables.md
• dist/gravewounds-data.json
• dist/team.html, the team builder (character generation)
• dist/campaign.html, the campaign console (the GM's console over the pages)
• the start page index.html

Next steps

From the design proposal (the rule changes from the rulebook comparison are agreed and written in):

1. Playtest the stop check, graze, morale and battle map (with its ground, height and cover) in the roller and tune their numbers.
2. Playtest the travel map and the campaign and battle maps, then add maps for the other campaigns and battles.
3. Playtest the medieval character generation (the team builder) and make a team in 20 minutes.
4. Playtest one fight with two teams, then a few weeks of camp, march and weather.

Copyright and trademarks

© 2026 Scott Wares. All rights reserved.

Grave Wounds' rules, tables and text are its own. The design notes compare it with Aftermath!, Rolemaster, Gamma World, Traveller and The Morrow Project, describing how those games work in our own words; none of their rules text, tables or art is reproduced here. Those names are trademarks of their owners, and Grave Wounds is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them. The wound data comes from published studies, cited in data/; period pictures are linked from Wikimedia Commons, not copied; maps are drawn from Natural Earth (public domain). The campaign and battle maps are drawn by us from public-domain coastline and plain facts (where places are, what the accounts say), not traced from any published map.